Many of the churches in our Tassie network have plateaued between 100-200 people - and sometimes stayed this way for years. This is often called the ‘200 barrier’ (in practice somewhere between 100 and 200).

The reason for this plateua has got to do with a bottleneck in the life and shape of the church. The capacity for the church to engage and incorporate and adjust to new people is geting seized up by a whole bunch of little things. And all sorts of signals are being sent to visitors and existing members which makes it hard to grow.

This is what people mean when they talk about ‘growth barriers’ - points where churches tend to plateau - they might grow for a season, but then oddly shrink back to roughly the same size. Because there are whole bunch of things that cause these growth barriers, they can’t be fixed simply by improving this or that program. A much larger change has to take place.

So how do we make progress with this ‘200 barrier’? How do we get past this 100-200 people point? To get past this particular ‘barrier’ is often the hardest of all, because it requires the church to change BOTH its leadership style AND its community life at once. Books, articles and lectures I’ve come across suggest the following things:

1. Vision and prayer

Setting a vision for growth is crucial if we and our leaders and our people are going to be motivated to make costly changes. And deep, kingdom-centred prayerfulness, that repents earnestly and looks beyond our immediate needs to ask bigger and bolder things of God is the kind of thing a truly gospel vision produces.

2. Volunteer leaders and leaders of leaders

The change in leadership that is needed for a church to grow, is the change from a paid leader and a bunch of pro-active volunteers muddling along together to a growing team of leaders and even leaders of leaders, some paid, but most volunteers. The more people are engaged in serious ministry, the more people can be engaged, incorporated, disipled and empowered. And to recruit and sustain more people ministering, you need more leaders of leaders to recruit, oversee and coach them well.

This means doubling or tripling the number of people we want in ministry, and doubling or tripling the number of people who have a significant role in recruiting, overseeing and coaching those in ministry. In other words make leadership development a high priority!

3. Act like a chuch of 200-300

It’s silly and pointless to pretend you are a church of 1000 people if you only have 85. But it is do-able to learn some habits and values of a church twice your size. Often the regulars at your church think of it as smaller than it is, whereas visitors come expecting more from you - as an already-biggish congregation.

So reading, visiting, and learning from just-slightly-larger churches can be helpful: how do they do things up the front on a Sunday? How do they communicate with the congregation? How do the do ministry?

4. Multiply ministry and multiply ministry staff

Last of all, most of the stuff about breaking the so-called ‘200 barrier’ talks about breaking out of the mould of being one single comunity with one main leader. Instead multiply leaders and multiply ministries.

This might mean working hard to gather the resources to appoint a second full-time senior pastor. The ministry capacity another gifted and trained pastor can bring is massive. It will be a financial stretch that will require some persuasion and maybe some creativity - but it’s the last time your budget will have to basically-double because of adding a single staff member!

This might also mean adding a second Sunday service - something I have written about in a previous newsletter - another way to open up the church to more people and more ministry opportunities.

Or it might simply mean being much more pro-active in growing the other ministries of the church - how to multiply more growth groups? More avenues for training, socialising and evangelism? How to grow the shape of the Sunday school and youth ministries?

Summary

This is hard work, and involves big changes and a new ways of doing church and leading in ministry. No wonder it’s hard for us to get past. But I really want to encourage us to do some talking, thinking, reading and praying about how we could remove unnecessary human barriers to our existing churches being even more fruitul for the gospel.